Making Bad Past Experience Work For You

‘We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.’ (Kenji Miyazawa)

Or, perhaps, we should ‘burn pain’ and embrace fuel!’ Seriously, we’re talking about motivation to achieve our goals. The use of fear of undesirable outcomes as a means to motivate greater effort is one strategy to achieve goals but I prefer something more reliable than my imagination rather, remembering a ‘bad’ experience, one that was quite possibly so bad that I told myself, ‘never again!’ Having such painful experiences is one thing, intentionally and vividly drawing upon them is an important ability. When we are able to ‘bank’ really bad situations (as hopefully we do happy memories)we can remind ourselves and better still, relive albeit in microcosm, how terribly we felt. I find doing this can if nothing else, release a deep feeling of gratitude that the situation I’m currently in is relatively not a big deal! I’m not saying that it doesn’t cease to be challenging, simply that it ceases to be so much of a challenge. We have faced personal Armageddon and come through and lived to tell the tale! We are able to use the past negative experiences actively, to enhance our current peace of mind as well. We have embraced the pain.